Guard against spambots and Amazon Bedrock gets Claude 3.5

This week's newsletter is authored by Michael Liendo.

Serverless Superhero

Our serverless superhero this week is David Calavera. David is an Engineering Manager at AWS, O’Reilly author and creator of Cargo Lambda–Rust functions on AWS made simple.

Recently spotted giving an excellent talk on Rust in the Believe in Serverless Discord, David embodies what it means to Dive Deep and stay Customer Obsessed.

Thank you David for all that you do!

Tutorials

Working with generative AI means experimenting to see which models best suit your use cases. Fortunately the Bedrock team announced the Converse API which greatly simplifies switching between models. In this post, Girish Bhatia shows how to create a transcript summary using Amazon Bedrock’s Converse API and Python.

Sometimes we don’t need to know how to build a specific thing with a tool, but rather the different use cases a tool was meant for. That’s exactly what this titled, Serverless Event-Driven Architectures with AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge post by Viraj Lakshitha Bandara accomplishes.

Interesting Reads

Datadog recently came out with the State of Cloud Costs report. In it they claim that more than 80% of container spend is wasted on idle resources, with 54% of that being purely from cluster idle!

One of the most irritating things about putting together a signup page is all of the bots that can crawl your site and could potentially signup with a fake account. Using a combination of frontend tools and offerings from Cognito/AWS, Vin Busquet shows how to mitigate spambots hitting your serverless infrastructure. This is a great read that is both practical for both frontend and backend builders.

Amazon Cloudformation allows for the ability custom resources to be defined. These hooks allow complex workflows to be provisioned into logical bits. However, as Serverless Hero Ran Isenberg showcases, there are considerations you should take when setting this up in your productions environments.

Spotlight

This week’s spotlight is a little different. This is a thread an account on X made showing everything wrong with Donkey Kong Country Returns HD. At first, I thought this was someone over analyzing the differences between the Wii version and Nintendo Switch. Then I realized this post is about how a product’s value is the net of all the improvements and tradeoffs made between its V1 and V2 release. Things I’ll consider when moving past the initial releases for my own projects.

Tip of the Week

Yan Cui shared some insights into why startups should opt for serverless early on.

This is the perfect case study for why startups should start with serverless.

I spoke with Hieu Do to find out how he built a hotel booking system for $0.82/month and his cost-cutting tips!https://t.co/jPl2FybUyj pic.twitter.com/iXp3aaBqyT
— Yan Cui (@theburningmonk) June 19, 2024

New Releases

Last Words

If you’d like to make a recommendation for the serverless superhero or for an article you found especially useful, send a message on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy coding!

Michael